Combining the musical styles of jazz and gospel comes naturally to Pete Malinverni. On his new live CD/DVD recording, Joyful! (ArtistShare, June 20), Malinverni, who has been in service as Minister of Music at The Devoe Street Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for the past fourteen years, has tapped into deep roots that stretch back to his hometown of Niagara Falls, NY, to his days of playing piano in an Italian Pentecostal church as a child, and to his early college years when jazz caught his ear and heart. Therefore, the music on Joyful!" represents a lifelong process that the artist has been engrossed in to reintroduce these two long lost sibling musical forms, which had been separated at birth."

The original impetus for the creation of Joyful! was an invitation from bassist Ben Allison of The Jazz Composers' Collective for Malinverni to write music for a concert they were producing. Malinverni remembers, faced with the need to come up with something different", I hit on the idea of writing original music for the voices I work with every Sunday. Based on my early love for funk and modern gospel and with my training in jazz and classical counterpoint I knew I could write the music. The words were, however, another story entirely. Then I remembered King David's great masterpiece, the 150 Psalms. Written as expressions of praise and supplication, the Psalms' poetic cadences struck me as ideal, having been written for musical settings in the first place." And thus the seeds for this project were planted.

Because the blend of jazz and gospel is so ingrained in Malinverni's playing, the value of this project was not readily apparent to him. He explains, after my trio's performance at last year's Caramoor Festival, I spoke with the Festival Producer, Jim Luce. Jim told me that, to his mind, the gospel/jazz music I'd been writing was something unique and worth the investment of time and money that would bring it to a wider audience. In that moment I saw the rightness of what Jim was suggesting and resolved to do what had to be done to make this project a reality."

To compose this music, I read and prayed over the Psalms. Eventually one would sort of make itself known to me and I worked with it until I found a melody. This was sometimes immediate, or in some cases, took months. Once I had a melody written I harmonized it, with soprano, alto and tenor lines. Then I set the melody and harmony to a rhythmic groove. Once completed, each piece was set into a suite, its place in the suite determined by the usual programming considerations of tempo, tonality, rhythmic feel, etc. Helping each piece segue comfortably into the next is the narration, the reading of the Psalm from which the text of each selection has been extracted.

Pete Malinverni on Joyful!: I've been going in this direction a long time. I started playing in church when I was just a kid. Interestingly, my home church was Italian Pentecostal. While I was training as a classical pianist and playing that music at church, I developed a great interest in African- American music, particularly the funk of Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, Billy Preston and others. I also started to hear the music of the black church in the work of Andrae Crouch and others in the modern gospel world and brought that sensibility with me into my own church. I received the usual warm support there but I was always amused at the confused expressions on the faces of the older congregants who were hearing something new to them. God bless you, but I can't recognize the song", was a pretty standard reaction. I started to play in a funk band with cousins and it wasn't long before jazz got in my ear as well, initially through airplay on a local Buffalo station, WBFO."

Malinverni continues, at college I continued my classical studies but, significantly, began to meet and play with contemporaries who were, like me, looking into the free and beautiful expression of Jazz. I also played at a student church there, where I met and befriended a man, Frederick Ennette, from Brooklyn, NY, which friendship would eventually change my life."

My old college friend Frederick Ennette moved back to his hometown of Brooklyn, now a graduate of the Morehouse School of Religion in Atlanta, GA, and an ordained Baptist Minister. In 1991 Frederick became Pastor of the Devoe Street Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, and shortly afterward invited me there to play. I felt at home in the church, whose congregation is by now at least ninety percent African-American, but which was founded, in 1904, as the First Italian Baptist Church of Brooklyn, NY. (The original founders, Italian-American immigrants like the ones who had founded my home church in Niagara Falls, NY, suffered the same persecution, but these people in Brooklyn went the next and beautiful step of inviting the African-Americans who had by the 1950s moved into the neighborhood to come and join them in their church. This act of true brotherhood is one that, I think, needs to be made known)."

After a short time the congregation at the Devoe Street Baptist Church invited me to become the Minister of Music and I have been there since, writing and arranging for and conducting the choir as well as choosing and leading the congregational singing. My wife, singer Jody Sandhaus, is one of my standout soloists and my ten-year-old son, Peter Luca, plays at church, sometimes at the piano and also the drums. So, it's not just a gig, it's a way of living a richer life for us, one I and my family appreciate as a great gift."

Since coming to New York I've worked not only as a musician but also as a record producer, producing my first three recordings (before beginning my happy relationship with Mark Feldman at Reservoir Music, with whom I've made, by now, six recordings) and three for Jody Sandhaus. That experience, of planning and bringing to realization a concept, came in handy with this project. I chose to do it with ArtistShare, appreciating the new model Brian Camelio is putting forward, by which musicians take control of their own output, from start to finish. I like that. I hope you will, too."

Also available from Pete Malinverni: Theme & Variations on Reservoir Music Perhaps best known for his piano trio recordings, Pete Malinverni has received universal acclaim for the unique approach his trio has employed toward that venerated form on several stellar recordings, earning inclusion in Year's Best" lists in several publications, including Down Beat Magazine. On Theme & Variations, he steps out alone and offers a singular look at the myriad possibilities of a solo piano performance.

Theme & Variations is the logical result of Pete Malinverni's ongoing lifelong search for musical truth through the study of all disciplines, including jazz and other musical forms. In the manner of so many of the best-loved works of the classical world, the centerpiece of this recording is indeed a theme (named Da Solo", Italian for alone") followed by a set of expressive variations. What is interesting and unique however, is that, while the Theme is through-composed, the variations, all thirteen of them, are improvised, in a tour de force performance wholly worthy of taking its place alongside the important recordings in jazz to date. Malinverni analyzed his Theme per the elements of music, rhythm, melody, harmony, texture and form, and then picked one or two elements on which to improvise each of the variations. The result is, by definition, a widely varied and expressive performance that conjures up a full range of emotions. Most impressive perhaps is that one becomes aware of Malinverni's formidable pianistic and compositional skills only when prompted. What one hears instead is music--just music--of a high sort, speaking of and to the deepest humanity, and without artifice.

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